A Workshop on Australian and South African Poetics

University of Western Sydney Bankstown campus (Bullecourt Ave, Milperra)

This workshop will bring together eminent Australian and South African poets and critics to consider how poets in societies with a white settler history think about their world through their poetry making. The subject is not white settler colonialism as a theme in poems, but as a limiting circumstance within which poets are concerned to develop particular idioms and techniques. How does this particular form of colonialism condition the aspiration to articulate truth in verse? What are the problems and politics of poetic craft generated by the settlement process and its aftermath? By comparing Australia and South Africa, we hope to avoid discussion of national ‘characteristics’, but, at the same time, to head off easy generalisations about postcolonialism or transnationalism. Our attention is on poetry’s material, approached in its regional specificity and through parallels in technical problems encountered during the global colonial expansion and its aftermath.

Disciplinary Context

This workshop aims to build on a conference held in Oxford last year, ‘Crafts of World Literature’ (http://craftsofworldliterature.wordpress.com/). The conference was conceived as a first step in a long-term project seeking to place questions of literary craft at the centre of postcolonial and world literary studies. While the eurocentrism of literary practices of representation has relentlessly been critiqued, and methods of deconstruction and discourse analysis developed in order to redress this; broadly speaking, the same categories and assumptions used in literary interpretation (terms such as ‘lyric’, ‘realism’, ‘tragedy’ and their histories) and aesthetic judgement (judgements such as good, bad, beautiful, inelegant etc) have either continued unaltered from earlier modes of practical criticism or been dispensed with altogether. We contend that if the literary craft of any given work is not approached in its context of intelligibility, then the kind of knowledge which is specific to it easily goes missing. By ‘context of intelligibility’, we mean that dynamic created by the community of writers, publishers and readers within which particular writers situate themselves and seek recognition, and those literary materials which are available to the writer in doing so.

More often than not, this approach will involve delineating and describing the field of practice within which writers work and make reputations, and these will tend to be regional in character. We are not, however, attempting to re-establish the nation as the necessary horizon for any given body of literature. We seek to fix our attention on the problems of composition that any given writer faces (simultaneously, what to write and how to write it), and such problems are often shared across literary communities with similar histories. For example, the poetic styles of the American Amiri Baraka and Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite share many characteristics: the attempt to emulate or invoke the rhythms of New World black music, to cultivate a performance-focussed poetics, to draw on the tone and rhetoric of Pan Africanism and black power. Not only do Caribbean and American black poets share a historical predicament in the legacies of slavery, but also common problems when confronting and absorbing the traditions of verse writing in English. To focus only on commonalities in the theme and content in such works would be to miss the significance of the thinking involved in the myriad decisions involved in composing verse of the desired aesthetic. This project, thus, also hopes to develop new modes of comparative research in postcolonial iterary studies, which rest neither on generalisations about national characteristics nor some pervasive ‘postcoloniality’.

Poetic Craft and White Settler Colonialism

This workshop will focus on the poetics of poetry written in societies established through white settler colonialism, particularly South Africa and Australia. The emphasis will be on the ways in which the dynamic of literary fields in colonial and postcolonial communities with a white settler history create particular contexts of intelligibility for poetic craft. To give an obvious example, the pastoral, which arrives with the settlers, is not a fixed genre, but presents parameters for technical development as writers attempt to settle (or unsettle) it in the colonial territory.1

Writers in many colonial and postcolonial contexts have had a clear sense of the need for differentiation from the European cultures disseminated through colonialism, particularly where legacies of racial domination and alienation are felt strongly, and this has been a spur to forge new technical and formal means (as per the Brathwaite-Baraka example). For white writers, or writers who identify as such, in the white-settler contexts with which we will be concerned, the need for such differentiation can be fitful and more ambivalent; many continue to take their lead from the historic centres of English literature without having a sense of great separation from them. Local critical communities can speak of ‘international’ standards and recognition, which set seemingly objective criteria by which to judge the merits of local writers, only compounding the provincialism of aesthetic effort and taste. Others, concerned with the legacy of settlement, and the meaning of their work in relation to it, can strive for a transformation in the means of composition, but often motivated by the concern to avoid an inherited complicity.

For indigenous and non-white writers, or writers who identify as such, the approach to craft takes place within the dynamic of white-dominated white-settler society. The colonial relation, and its legacy, are internalised and so the situation does not easily fit the globe-spanning ‘metropoleperiphery’ model that gets used for much commentary on colonial/postcolonial writing. Confrontation, then, will be not only with an externally imposed canon and culture that we find, say, in much South Asian and African writing in English, but will also be conducted as an articulation and rupturing within the local field. This can often prompt work with an overtly political intent, introducing a political principle of hierarchization.2 Uncritical moral celebration, on the one hand, or pejorative judgements that use, without reflection, the ideals of literary autonomy borrowed from European and/or international fields, on the other, can divert attention away from the specificity of craft’s intelligibility in such cases.

While the early histories of such societies are largely a Manichaean confrontation of settler and native, and the sense of this polarity is powerfully persistent, the workshop by no means seeks to limit attention only to writers who can neatly be allotted to these two identity categories. The subject is the craft of poetry in societies that have been created through this form of colonialism, and, so, concerns poetry that emerges from any social position: the social circumstances produced by immigration, whether indentured or economic, are as relevant as any other. Here we also encounter diverse crosscultural networks which may or may not appear in a distinct light when viewed through the workshop’s ‘white settler’ conceptual focus.

The workshop is not primarily concerned to address racial identity: the whiteness, blackness, ‘hybridity’ or otherwise of writers – we do not seek to highlight a literary technique and link it to an identity or to ‘subject formation’. The central question is of how knowledge is created through craft, and the ways in which the settler context conditions the literary thinking of its writers. If race has so often been a central anxiety and limiting circumstance it will be found sedimented in the literary material; and it is at the level of their literary qualities that the truth-content of the works might be illuminated. Nor is the primary focus ‘language’ in general (or ‘discourse’). It is concerned, first, with the means by which language matter is shaped into significant form, and the way the horizon of possible means sets the parameters for expressiveness.

With that said, the categories used above to articulate the problematic – such as ‘poetry’, ‘verse’, ‘composition’, ‘significant form’ – are challenged by the historical circumstances of the societies in question. A restricted focus on the poetic genres and techniques settled by Europeans would present a much distorted account of the materials in play. Therefore ‘poetic craft’ here must include consideration of materials from the full range of literacies and utterances in such societies as might be considered relevant to the study of poetics. This is not to suggest that materials should be approached sceptically as ‘texts’ without qualities: it could be part of the workshop’s task to raise the question of what it would be to attend to the ‘poetics’ of material that is not immediately recognisable as verse.3

We focus on poetry and poetics because, in its practice, decisions of craft are that much more concentrated and exposed. Speakers by no means need to adopt the premises of this proposal, which, necessarily, has been abstract and somewhat ahistorical. No doubt, inaccuracies will be found when addressing the specific circumstances and histories here being brought together. It may be that the decision to foreground the concept of ‘white settler’ only re-emphasises tendencies which have blinded criticism to the problematics of literary technique in the societies concerned. Debate and dissension from the terms of this proposal are thus encouraged. The concern, though, is with poetic craft and technique, and all speakers and participants are encouraged to discuss specific significant instances of craft decisions in particular poems (or material which benefits from a poetic reading),
rather than to pitch their arguments solely in general conceptual or historical terms.

1 Take JM Coetzee’s discussion in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, (New Haven, 1988), or John Kinsella’s ‘anti-pastoral’ as developed in Silo, The Hunt and New Arcadia.2 See Jarad Zimbler, ‘For neither love nor money: the place of political art in Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field’, Textual Practice 23(4), 2009, 599–620.3 A challenge that has begun to be answered in Australia by the recent Macquarie PEN anthologies of Australian Literature and Aboriginal Literature and, specifically in poetics, by Michael Farrell’s doctoral thesis, ‘Unsettlement: A New Reading of Australian Poetics’

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Events

Poetry ’74, a conference held at the Centre of Extra-Mural Studies at UCT, sparked a conflagration in South African literature, by gathering into a combustible mix different generations of local poets and critics, and different views about the purpose and politics of verse. Forty years on, our colloquium will revisit this moment, assessing its lasting effects, whilst giving a perspective on similar ‘versicides’ occurring elsewhere in the anglophone literary world at much the same time, programmes of aesthetic contestation dynamized by forthright reckonings with the colonial legacy: in Australia, poets breaking with the nationalist paradigms of the previous generation polarized into parochial and cosmopolitan camps; in the Caribbean, the publication in 1970 of Savacou 3/4, a divisive anthology of contemporary verse, brought into the open regional antagonisms centred on poetic craft and oral poetry. Craft Wars presents an opportunity to think broadly about the ways in which such contests reshape horizons of expressive possibility, and to develop a comparative critical framework that recognizes the importance of literary practice, local materials, and the role of institutions in structuring regional literatures.

Poetry ’74, a conference held at the Centre of Extra-Mural Studies at UCT, sparked a conflagration in South African literature, by gathering into a combustible mix different generations of local poets and critics, and different views about the purpose and politics of verse. Forty years on, our colloquium will revisit this moment, assessing its lasting effects, whilst giving a perspective on similar ‘versicides’ occurring elsewhere in the anglophone literary world at much the same time, programmes of aesthetic contestation dynamized by forthright reckonings with the colonial legacy: in Australia, poets breaking with the nationalist paradigms of the previous generation polarized into parochial and cosmopolitan camps; in the Caribbean, the publication in 1970 of Savacou 3/4, a divisive anthology of contemporary verse, brought into the open regional antagonisms centred on poetic craft and oral poetry. Craft Wars presents an opportunity to think broadly about the ways in which such contests reshape horizons of expressive possibility, and to develop a comparative critical framework that recognizes the importance of literary practice, local materials, and the role of institutions in structuring regional literatures.
The last of these factors is especially relevant: institutions such as the Centre of Extra-Mural Studies are so often crucial to the emergence of new literatures. A similar focus on institutions has characterized two previous conferences, Crafts of World Literature (University of Oxford, September 2012) and Poetic Craft and White Settler Colonialism (University of Western Sydney, September 2013), as has the emphasis on literary practice, and on the importance of attending to the particularities of different regional literary fields. At the first of these events, participants responded with papers on a range of periods, genres and regions, a selection of which will be published as a special issue of Journal of Commonwealth Literature. The second event was a workshop for invited speakers, addressing poetry in South Africa and Australia, and involving both makers and critics of verse (a proposal for a special issue has been accepted by Wasafiri). For Craft Wars, we propose something similar: a series of public readings and talks, as well as a colloquium at which invited speakers might consider the histories, challenges and prospects of postcolonial poetry and poetics, with a specific focus on South Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. We would seek to publish selected papers either in a journal special issue, or as a volume with an appropriate university press.
The broader aim of the Crafts of World Literature project has been to reorient postcolonial literary studies in the direction of literary technique, not in the name of any new formalism, but because we believe that technique is the way art thinks, and so is the particular means by which it confronts us with the truths of our world. Fundamental to both previous events, as it would be here, is the related belief that the artist’s materials are always local, or at least located, but that a comparison of regional fields emerging in the wake of decolonization helps to identify the forces shaping them. Indeed, these events have been most interesting when homologies between literary communities have suddenly appeared, revealing broader world-systemic pressures and structures without needing either to foreground transnational connections, or to ignore the very real national concerns that often set the parameters for aesthetic disputation. As for our focus on poetry, this is easily explained: though it was so often found at the heart of early debates about the purpose, place and outline of new literatures, poetry has been marginalized by postcolonial literary criticism, which, focusing relentlessly on representation and narrative, has privileged the novel as primary object of investigation. This has hardly kept poets from writing, but the conversations with critics outside national parameters and institutions have barely begun, to the detriment of readers but also makers of verse. In this too, Craft Wars presents an opportunity.

Sessions and poetry readings of the colloquium are open to all, without registration or entrance fee, except for Thursday’s opening event at Wrensch House, which, due to space restrictions, is by invitation only.

A Workshop on Australian and South African Poetics

University of Western Sydney Bankstown campus (Bullecourt Ave, Milperra)

This workshop will bring together eminent Australian and South African poets and critics to consider how poets in societies with a white settler history think about their world through their poetry making. The subject is not white settler colonialism as a theme in poems, but as a limiting circumstance within which poets are concerned to develop particular idioms and techniques. How does this particular form of colonialism condition the aspiration to articulate truth in verse? What are the problems and politics of poetic craft generated by the settlement process and its aftermath? By comparing Australia and South Africa, we hope to avoid discussion of national ‘characteristics’, but, at the same time, to head off easy generalisations about postcolonialism or transnationalism. Our attention is on poetry’s material, approached in its regional specificity and through parallels in technical problems encountered during the global colonial expansion and its aftermath.

Disciplinary Context

This workshop aims to build on a conference held in Oxford last year, ‘Crafts of World Literature’ (http://craftsofworldliterature.wordpress.com/). The conference was conceived as a first step in a long-term project seeking to place questions of literary craft at the centre of postcolonial and world literary studies. While the eurocentrism of literary practices of representation has relentlessly been critiqued, and methods of deconstruction and discourse analysis developed in order to redress this; broadly speaking, the same categories and assumptions used in literary interpretation (terms such as ‘lyric’, ‘realism’, ‘tragedy’ and their histories) and aesthetic judgement (judgements such as good, bad, beautiful, inelegant etc) have either continued unaltered from earlier modes of practical criticism or been dispensed with altogether. We contend that if the literary craft of any given work is not approached in its context of intelligibility, then the kind of knowledge which is specific to it easily goes missing. By ‘context of intelligibility’, we mean that dynamic created by the community of writers, publishers and readers within which particular writers situate themselves and seek recognition, and those literary materials which are available to the writer in doing so.
More often than not, this approach will involve delineating and describing the field of practice within which writers work and make reputations, and these will tend to be regional in character. We are not, however, attempting to re-establish the nation as the necessary horizon for any given body of literature. We seek to fix our attention on the problems of composition that any given writer faces (simultaneously, what to write and how to write it), and such problems are often shared across literary communities with similar histories. For example, the poetic styles of the American Amiri Baraka and Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite share many characteristics: the attempt to emulate or invoke the rhythms of New World black music, to cultivate a performance-focussed poetics, to draw on the tone and rhetoric of Pan Africanism and black power. Not only do Caribbean and American black poets share a historical predicament in the legacies of slavery, but also common problems when confronting and absorbing the traditions of verse writing in English. To focus only on commonalities in the theme and content in such works would be to miss the significance of the thinking involved in the myriad decisions involved in composing verse of the desired aesthetic. This project, thus, also hopes to develop new modes of comparative research in postcolonial iterary studies, which rest neither on generalisations about national characteristics nor some pervasive ‘postcoloniality’.

Poetic Craft and White Settler Colonialism

This workshop will focus on the poetics of poetry written in societies established through white settler colonialism, particularly South Africa and Australia. The emphasis will be on the ways in which the dynamic of literary fields in colonial and postcolonial communities with a white settler history create particular contexts of intelligibility for poetic craft. To give an obvious example, the pastoral, which arrives with the settlers, is not a fixed genre, but presents parameters for technical development as writers attempt to settle (or unsettle) it in the colonial territory.1
Writers in many colonial and postcolonial contexts have had a clear sense of the need for differentiation from the European cultures disseminated through colonialism, particularly where legacies of racial domination and alienation are felt strongly, and this has been a spur to forge new technical and formal means (as per the Brathwaite-Baraka example). For white writers, or writers who identify as such, in the white-settler contexts with which we will be concerned, the need for such differentiation can be fitful and more ambivalent; many continue to take their lead from the historic centres of English literature without having a sense of great separation from them. Local critical communities can speak of ‘international’ standards and recognition, which set seemingly objective criteria by which to judge the merits of local writers, only compounding the provincialism of aesthetic effort and taste. Others, concerned with the legacy of settlement, and the meaning of their work in relation to it, can strive for a transformation in the means of composition, but often motivated by the concern to avoid an inherited complicity.
For indigenous and non-white writers, or writers who identify as such, the approach to craft takes place within the dynamic of white-dominated white-settler society. The colonial relation, and its legacy, are internalised and so the situation does not easily fit the globe-spanning ‘metropoleperiphery’ model that gets used for much commentary on colonial/postcolonial writing. Confrontation, then, will be not only with an externally imposed canon and culture that we find, say, in much South Asian and African writing in English, but will also be conducted as an articulation and rupturing within the local field. This can often prompt work with an overtly political intent, introducing a political principle of hierarchization.2 Uncritical moral celebration, on the one hand, or pejorative judgements that use, without reflection, the ideals of literary autonomy borrowed from European and/or international fields, on the other, can divert attention away from the specificity of craft’s intelligibility in such cases.
While the early histories of such societies are largely a Manichaean confrontation of settler and native, and the sense of this polarity is powerfully persistent, the workshop by no means seeks to limit attention only to writers who can neatly be allotted to these two identity categories. The subject is the craft of poetry in societies that have been created through this form of colonialism, and, so, concerns poetry that emerges from any social position: the social circumstances produced by immigration, whether indentured or economic, are as relevant as any other. Here we also encounter diverse crosscultural networks which may or may not appear in a distinct light when viewed through the workshop’s ‘white settler’ conceptual focus.
The workshop is not primarily concerned to address racial identity: the whiteness, blackness, ‘hybridity’ or otherwise of writers – we do not seek to highlight a literary technique and link it to an identity or to ‘subject formation’. The central question is of how knowledge is created through craft, and the ways in which the settler context conditions the literary thinking of its writers. If race has so often been a central anxiety and limiting circumstance it will be found sedimented in the literary material; and it is at the level of their literary qualities that the truth-content of the works might be illuminated. Nor is the primary focus ‘language’ in general (or ‘discourse’). It is concerned, first, with the means by which language matter is shaped into significant form, and the way the horizon of possible means sets the parameters for expressiveness.
With that said, the categories used above to articulate the problematic – such as ‘poetry’, ‘verse’, ‘composition’, ‘significant form’ – are challenged by the historical circumstances of the societies in question. A restricted focus on the poetic genres and techniques settled by Europeans would present a much distorted account of the materials in play. Therefore ‘poetic craft’ here must include consideration of materials from the full range of literacies and utterances in such societies as might be considered relevant to the study of poetics. This is not to suggest that materials should be approached sceptically as ‘texts’ without qualities: it could be part of the workshop’s task to raise the question of what it would be to attend to the ‘poetics’ of material that is not immediately recognisable as verse.3
We focus on poetry and poetics because, in its practice, decisions of craft are that much more concentrated and exposed. Speakers by no means need to adopt the premises of this proposal, which, necessarily, has been abstract and somewhat ahistorical. No doubt, inaccuracies will be found when addressing the specific circumstances and histories here being brought together. It may be that the decision to foreground the concept of ‘white settler’ only re-emphasises tendencies which have blinded criticism to the problematics of literary technique in the societies concerned. Debate and dissension from the terms of this proposal are thus encouraged. The concern, though, is with poetic craft and technique, and all speakers and participants are encouraged to discuss specific significant instances of craft decisions in particular poems (or material which benefits from a poetic reading),
rather than to pitch their arguments solely in general conceptual or historical terms.
1 Take JM Coetzee’s discussion in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, (New Haven, 1988), or John Kinsella’s ‘anti-pastoral’ as developed in Silo, The Hunt and New Arcadia.
2 See Jarad Zimbler, ‘For neither love nor money: the place of political art in Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field’, Textual Practice 23(4), 2009, 599–620.
3 A challenge that has begun to be answered in Australia by the recent Macquarie PEN anthologies of Australian Literature and Aboriginal Literature and, specifically in poetics, by Michael Farrell’s doctoral thesis, ‘Unsettlement: A New Reading of Australian Poetics’
Download the workshop statement

Faculty of English, University of Oxford

September 28-30, 2012

Crafts of World Literature is a three-day conference which seeks to realign the approach taken by scholars in Postcolonial and World Literature studies towards the literatures which they read and interpret, fixing at the centre of the discussion a close attention to the techniques and crafts of writing. This does not entail turning away from political and social considerations or a return to unhistorical formalisms, but exploring ways of reading that overcome the apparent antinomy between literary technique and historical content.
It will bring together a range of scholars at every career stage whose work encompasses a diversity of theoretical approaches. The aim is not to reach consensus but to draw disagreements in the field onto the neglected terrain of literary craft, and, thereby, to open new questions and interpretative practices.

Writing does not grow within us like a cabbage while our thoughts are elsewhere,’ I replied, not a little testily. ‘It is a craft won by long practice, as you should know.’ Foe pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But as there are many kinds of men so are there many kinds of writing. - J.M. Coetzee

It is a staple of the literary criticism produced in the wake of decolonization that the formalism and aestheticism of metropolitan art can have no place in literatures of struggle. Yet, in one literary manifesto after another, amongst the aims set down by writers of decolonization, one finds asserted the desire for new, or at least different ways of writing and seeing; the desire, that is, for different modes, styles, techniques, voices and rhythms. In a word, what is aimed at is a new literary material, to be forged through labour on those received local practices of speaking and writing, and those literary materials introduced and constituted during the colonial process.
Through this conference, we seek to realign the ways in which we read and respond to postcolonial and world literature, fixing at the centre of our critical practices a close attention to techniques and crafts of writing. In so doing we are asking presenters not to turn away from political and social considerations or to return to unhistorical formalisms, but rather to explore ways of reading that overcome the apparent antinomy between literary technique and historical content. For, however much we remain committed to the immediate – which is not to say unmediated – experience of literary works as the starting point for analysis; and however strongly we agree with the description of a world literary space characterized by trans-national movements; we remain convinced of two things: first, the need to locate works in relation to those particular (and often non-metropolitan) fields and materials from which they have arisen and which they have attempted, line by line, to refashion; and second, the need for an orientation towards the world, which is to say, towards those social, political and existential projects that have stimulated the authors with whom we are concerned as well as the formation of postcolonial studies itself.
Although we recognize how necessary it has been for ‘commonwealth’, ‘postcolonial’, and now a revived notion of ‘world’ literary studies to open up criticism to new contexts and traditions, we cannot ignore the limitations placed on our critical and pedagogical practices by discourse analysis and thematic reading, ideological critique and deconstruction. Narrowly concerned with presence and absence, inversion and subversion, appropriation, undermining and writing back, and a relentless focus on representation and the politics of identity, our field has become burdened by concepts whose weight grows in inverse proportion to their substance. The time has undoubtedly come then for us to re-think the language of literary analysis, making use where necessary of such disciplines as poetics, narratology, dramaturgy and stylistics whilst being prepared to develop new tools and new terms; to delimit those institutions and forces that have helped to constitute and structure literary communities; to interrogate claims for a blandly inclusive ‘world literature’; to examine the ways in which national fields are articulated with and by regional and supranational affiliations; and to return more rigorously to the relation between the decomposition of European empires and the development of literary practices of decolonization.
Papers may address, but are not restricted to, the following areas:
Close readings of works: we invite close readings of works which focus on the materials of writing, reflecting particularly on the manner in which stylistic, generic and formal decisions are situated within the dynamics of colonial, postcolonial and global literary communities, and their historical situations.
Institutions, fields, aesthetic communities: we invite discussion of the institutions which constitute and are constituted by literary cultures (publishers, writers groups, agents, curricula and schools, periodicals, prizes, legal structures etc); the literary fields of interaction, influence and relational position-taking from which works emerge; and the communities of sensibility within which works are judged and achieve distinction.
Situating the materials of literature and the tools of literary criticism: we invite discussion of the materials of literary practice – poetics, narrative form, genre, modes of figuration, lexicons etc. – and the tools of analysis which are used to discuss these practices – stylistics, prosody, narratology etc. – as well as the manner in which such materials and tools are transformed by local literary demands and the political and social projects of writers and critics (or lack thereof).
Decolonization and literary practice: we invite consideration of the emergence of literary communities from colonial and neo-colonial processes, and the ways in which writing practices carry forward wishes for sovereignty, autonomy, and the establishment of new centres of cultural gravity, whether national or otherwise.
Exile, Diaspora, Transnationalism, World Literature: we invite consideration of the complex of local, regional and international arenas within and between which writers move and operate, and which together constitute the larger field of ‘World Literature’.
**The deadline for submissions has now passed**
Download the full call for papers

Timothy Brennan, Dept. of English, University of Minnesota
Derek Attridge, Dept. of English and Related Literature, University of York
Steph Newell, School of English, University of Sussex
Amit Chaudhuri, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia
Nicholas Harrison, Dept. of French, King’s College, University of London
Michel Hockx, Dept. of the Languages and Cultures of China and Inner Asia, SOAS, University of London
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, University of Allahabad
Rosinka Chaudhuri, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
Keya Ganguly, Dept. of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
Jean Khalfa, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
Elleke Boehmer, Fac. of English, University of Oxford
Peter McDonald, Fac. of English, University of Oxford
Ankhi Mukherjee, Fac. of English, University of Oxford